Katarina Witt
Yuna Kim
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Katarina Witt leads 3 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Katarina Witt at #6 and Yuna Kim at #11.
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The case for Katarina Witt
The most watched skater of the television era and the last woman before the quadruple age to defend an Olympic title. Witt won gold at Sarajevo 1984 and Calgary 1988, the first back-to-back women's champion since Sonja Henie, and added four world titles in 1984, 1985, 1987 and 1988 plus six consecutive European championships from 1983. Calgary produced the Battle of the Carmens, in which she and the American Debi Thomas skated to the same score; Witt won on presentation with the more conservative technical content, a result that crystallised the sport's permanent argument between difficulty and performance. She was trained in Karl-Marx-Stadt by Jutta Müller, in the most systematic skating program East Germany ever built, and competed under state surveillance that later filled a Stasi file thousands of pages long. After reunification she became a global commercial figure, and she returned as a reinstated professional to the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics, finishing seventh with a program dedicated to Sarajevo under siege.
The case for Yuna Kim
The most complete competitor of the pre-quadruple women's era, and the skater who built a sport in a country that did not have one. Kim won Olympic gold at Vancouver 2010 with a world-record 228.56, finishing 23 points clear of Mao Asada in the largest winning margin the modern system has produced at a Games, and took silver at Sochi 2014 in a result still disputed by judges and federations alike. She won world titles in 2009 and 2013 and the 2009 Four Continents, and was the first woman to pass 200 points overall, scoring 207.71 at the 2009 World Championships in Los Angeles. She never finished off the podium at a senior ISU championship. South Korea had almost no figure skating infrastructure when she began; by Vancouver her free skate commanded a national audience share that emptied streets, and rink construction and youth registration followed within a few years. Textbook technique, and a competition record close to flawless.